Mamdani Wins Endorsement Of Powerful Health Care Union Once Loyal To Cuomo

By Claudia Irizarry Aponte, The City

July 21, 2025

1199SEIU, the largest healthcare union in the country with 450,000 members in the Northeast, endorsed Queens Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani for mayor on Friday, after backing former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June primary.

The politically powerful union, fresh off of its own contentious leadership election, is the latest labor group to line up behind Mamdani following the democratic socialist’s decisive victory over Cuomo, who has since announced he is staying in the race as an independent.

In addition to 1199SEIU, the list of unions that flipped from Cuomo to Mamdani after the primary includes the Hotel Trades & Gaming Council and 32BJ SEIU, the union representing building workers.

In recent days, Mamdani also captured the support of the city’s two largest public sector unions, the United Federation of Teachers and District Council 37, which represents civil servants. The two organizations jointly represent roughly 60% of all municipal employees.

“1199SEIU’s 200,000 New York City members are frontline healthcare workers who save lives and care for the most vulnerable New Yorkers every day, but the city’s cost of living is wearing us down,” union president Yvonne Armstrong said in a statement. “We need a mayor like Zohran who has a plan to ensure frontline caregivers can continue working and living in our city.”

Mamdani appeared virtually before the union’s executive council on Friday morning to give his final pitch and answer a handful of questions, ranging from funding for the city’s public hospitals system to the long-simmering crisis of missed payments to nonprofits subcontracted by the city.

The council voted to endorse him shortly after; no one presented an endorsement for Cuomo, said Helen Schaub, the union’s political director. The union was captivated by Mamdani’s ability to mobilize voters and articulate his vision not just for an affordable city but to defend New York against threats from the federal government, she said.

“In the face of those kinds of threats, we need to unite together and really defend our city, and defend its people and make sure that New Yorkers can afford to live in the city,” Schaub said. “I think that was a message that resonated clearly in the election, and it’s a message that we fully support, and we want to be part of building that unity.”

Although his campaign centered on improving public goods and addressing the city’s affordability crisis, Mamdani failed to fully capture union support in the primary despite a groundswell of support led by an army of organizers and 50,000 volunteers.

Even as many union leaders were impressed by his campaign’s organizing might, they aligned behind Cuomo, who consistently led the polls by healthy margins and whose victory appeared all but inevitable for much of the race.

Union support is highly coveted by campaigns because of their generous contributions and baked-in base of support.

But in the primary, the city’s largest unions, which backed Cuomo, failed to mobilize their members to knock on doors, phone bank, canvass and above all vote for their chosen candidate, an outcome some observers blamed, in part, on an affordability crisis that has led blue-collar workers out of the five boroughs and to the suburbs — an issue at the heart of Mamdani’s campaign.

Schaub said that 1199SEIU relied on polling and its established relationship with Cuomo, and that it could not predict Mamdani’s unprecedented expansion of the Democratic electorate, especially among young people and South Asian voters.

It was an embarrassing result for big labor, which has been criticized by its own memberships for being too top-down and out of touch with the rank and file. That kind of frustration led to insurgent takeovers of union leadership in recent years, most recently at 1199SEIU, whose members voted to oust its embattled longtime president George Gresham in May.

The union’s endorsement of Cuomo in April angered some rank and file members, appalled that their union of healthcare workers, most of whom are women of color, endorsed the former governor despite the sexual harassment claims against him and his botched handling of nursing homes during the pandemic.

An online petition of 1199SEIU members calling on the union to rescind its endorsement of Cuomo before the primary nabbed hundreds of signatures.

“How can a union for healthcare workers endorse a candidate who put the elderly and already ill in nursing homes at risk during the COVID pandemic and then intentionally minimized the number of deaths that resulted?,” wrote one of the signees. “How can a union that supports women endorse a candidate who has been credibly accused of sexual harassment?”

“I think it’s always a good sign if members feel passionately enough about something to organize around it,” said Schaub, adding that the union took that “passion” into consideration for Friday’s endorsement.

The UFT sat out the primary entirely because its members were split between Cuomo and Mamdani, union president Michael Mulgrew told THE CITY at the time. Mulgrew, fresh from fending off another spirited challenge in his union, said the union wasn’t interested in issuing a ranked endorsement. “We’ve never ranked, we think you’re watering down your own endorsement when you rank,” he said.

DC 37 stood out among vanishingly few unions who made use of a ranked-choice endorsement strategy, choosing Mamdani as part of a ranked slate led by council speaker Adrienne Adams, who captured just 4.1% of first-round votes.

Leaders of that union championed Mamdani’s run. DC 37 treasurer Maf Misbah Uddin was somewhat of a surrogate of the Mamdani campaign: he gave a spirited speech to the crowd of volunteers at a June rally at a Manhattan concert venue and appeared in an online campaign video highlighting Bangladeshi supporters in Parkchester.

“Zohran is the voice for the voiceless, he is for the least, he is for the lost, and he is for the last,” Uddin said at the rally. “We have 150,000 members, 86,000 retirees, 200,000 family members — and we vote.”

When DC 37 formally endorsed Mamdani for the November general election in an event held in its lower Manhattan headquarters on Tuesday, Uddin stood prominently next to the candidate, though he did not speak.

“We do not want this city to become a museum where working people once lived, we want it to be a living, breathing testament of what’s possible,” Mamdani said at the DC 37 event.

This press release was produced by The City. The views expressed here are the author’s own.